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Federal Court Issues Permanent Injunction For Isohunt
suraj.sun writes with this excerpt from NewTeeVee: "Judge Stephen Wilson of the US District Court of California, Southern District, issued a permanent injunction (PDF) against the popular torrent site Isohunt yesterday, forcing the site and its owner Garry Fung to immediately prevent access to virtually all Hollywood movies. The injunction theoretically leaves the door open for the site to deploy a strict filtering system, but its terms are so broad that Isohunt has little choice but to shut down or at the very least block all US visitors. ... The verdict states that they have to cease 'hosting, indexing, linking to, or otherwise providing access to any (torrent) or similar files' that can be used to download the studios' movies and TV shows. Studios have to supply Isohunt with a list of titles of works they own, and Isohunt has to start blocking those torrents within 24 hours."
Wildcard Studios is allowing the MPAA to use the name of their movie "*" in their list of films to block.
Fung you!
The last time I checked, Isohunt was based in Canada as was Garry Fung. And last time I checked, Canada was (not yet) part of the US. Just another arrogant American judge who thinks that the entire world should be subject to US rule and law.
Can someone clue me in to why isohunt was hosting movies/music in the first place?
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
rofl
No worries, that's the name of the sequel.
Again, this proves just how utterly clueless judges (and politicans) are of how the Internet actually works.
Well, at least IsoHunt can introduce ban for certain movie names that studios need to tell them. Swedish courts made three injunctions yesterday which,
1) Took OpenBitTorrent tracker completely down
2) Banned TPB (ex-)admins from working with the site or any other torrent related site in the future
3) Ordered the upstream provider of TPB to stop serving bandwidth to them.
With ACTA and all of these recent developments, I don't think piracy will be so widespread for many more years. It's great theres good services like Spotify and Steam now though - just need similar for TV shows and movies now (and Voddler is coming).
Do it. And then do something for your education: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrhic_victory
Isohunt was way past its prime anyway and begging to be put out of its misery. Remember, its just an index site that scraped other sites and posted their links. It never had its own tracker. It never verified torrents (in any effective way at least). In the early days, it was a slightly better option than TBP because it indexed multiple sites, but it has really run its course. There are better torrent sites for those who wish to continue their swashbuckling ways. And what were these guys thinking hosting this in Canada anyway? The canuks have copyright laws too and are real friendly with the us.
I wonder how much of his traffic is actually from the US.
And how is he supposed to prevent someone from setting up "http://isohunt.mydomain.notus" to just proxy Isohunt so he can anyway get hits on his adverts? If the proxy would siphon off some of the ads for their own income stream, this might be an interesting business model.
He should file an appeal ... in Canada. The US just established cross-border jurisdiction (a court order in one country can be applied to another), so it would now be valid.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I'm going to celebrate tonight.
I hope your celebration won't entail overeating or drinking to excess, because if you're going to do that everytime Big Media hits the Wack-A-Mole, you're going to ruin your health.
ACTA will change the cat and mouse game. If the bar is raised so there is no piracy (such as on the PS3), there will be a fundamental shift to OSS projects, and the IP battle will then be fought on the patent trolls versus OSS project maintainers front.
Necessity is the mother of invention. Right now, BitTorrent + proxies, or BitTorrent + addons is good enough. If BT sites get squashed, someone is going to make a replacement that is distributed, using magnet links and distributed trackers. It might even be a distributed filesystem that stores random blocks on random computers in the network, where when a hash of a file is passed to one node, it will grab a range of blocks from some other nodes, and pass the rest of the block requests to still another node. Of course, throttling and blocking encrypted traffic might slow this down, but it would end up being tunneled over SSL, DNS, and other protocols.
Or, USENET would regain popularity and a lot of sites would pop up with a lot of storage and long alt.binaries.* retention.
Can we please not have links that go to crazy sites with silly programming that wants your password to other sites? How about just a straight link that gets the file. Why can't Slashdot just host the PDF?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Despite rumors that we are ordered to filter by keywords for the US, there's only a proposed order, no actual order. Freedom of speech, non-infringing use and technical implementability issues are still being debated in further court briefs. We have not done any keyword filtering and are fighting all we can not to
I don't have the legal skills to know which one is right, but ISOHunt is still not actually filtering.
Qxe4
"I don't think piracy will be so widespread for many more years"
You don't understand the digital world, then. or people.
And how do you know the blacklist uses SQL LIKE syntax?
The American government will have to claim a military state over everywhere they distribute copyrighted content to, to "get this under control".
only when the majority of people in the world are sitting at their computers with an armed guard watching to ensure that each and every one of us is complying with american copyright laws, will they get to maintain their fucking Draconian laws.
at which point, the people getting paid to watch people will begin thinking they're "entitled to a little piracy, as they're the ones enforcing it" and that whole system will fall apart.
which brings us back to the issue at hand. change. continue changing to meet the needs of your people, or stand aside and let somebody else try.
because what you're doing obviously isn't working.
And how is he supposed to prevent someone from setting up "http://isohunt.mydomain.notus" to just proxy Isohunt so he can anyway get hits on his adverts? If the proxy would siphon off some of the ads for their own income stream, this might be an interesting business model.
I know it's bad form to reply to one's own post, but I just now understood that this idea is an interesting example where copyright infringement is directly beneficial to the party whose content is being infringed upon.
I can just imagine Fung half-heartedly suing the proxy site(s) for infringement, just so he can CYA with respect to the injunction.
All torrent sites should drop to FreeNet. In fact torrent swarms should drop to FreeNet as well.
So what? Okay, let's say Isohunt blocks torrents with filenames similar enough to the studios lists. Now what?
Terminator2-[DVDRip]-[EnglishEspanol].torrent just becomes H5sghfa35tgAC.torrent. The resulting file could still be named Terminator2-[DVDRip]-[EnglishEspanol].mp4. Or even H5sghfa35tgAC.dat for that matter.
How clueless is the federal court and the people running those studios?
I can see a knockoff coming, see Mininova etc...
BINHunt.org anyone? MDFHunt.org?
Time to register some domains!
We should start a new Slashdot and return control to the geeks. It actually wouldn't be that hard to get some users to
I don't know about such things, but is it theoretically possible for torrents to work without trackers?
I have a feeling that after ACTA and the RIAA and MPAA and the GNAA have finished changing the laws everywhere, and have done their best, that technology is going to continue to stay one step ahead of them.
Ultimately, I wonder if the only thing they can do that'll stop filesharing is to shut down the Internet. And don't think the members of the RIAA and MPAA wouldn't love to do just that.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Wildcard Studios is allowing the MPAA to use the name of their movie "*" in their list of films to block.
Being somewhat of a chess buff, I hope I'm still able to download The Search for Bobby Tables.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
I am not going to make any clever comment either about the difference of hosting vs tracking or any clever comment about the jurisdiction limits of country X against citizens of country Y.
Capital, money, power, oppression, violence, lethal viruses, data, information, DNA, encryption keys and hashes have no country because they belong to God.
This is about the real meaning of the primordial sin: You should not know, touch, consume or desire what God does. Repent as long you still have a soul, preferably before committing the sin, because desire is the real sin and God knows your desires.
Noone will be spared. Everybody is guilty in the eyes of God, even when proven mentally incapable or having a clever lawyer. And no, I will not make any clever comment about the difference between God and His Holy Church.
You have been warned.
Trackers are still used since some clients don't know how to do anything else. If not for such clients, BT could easily move to an already existing distributed tracking system.
$ make available
Trackers are needed so that the peers can locate each other efficiently. If you're downloading a file, the tracker will tell you who is hosting the various pieces so you can connect to them. Without the tracker your client would have no way to know the IP's which are hosting the file.
It's the same problem that's been present since the early days of P2P. You need to have some hosts which keep an index of the files and the IP addresses of clients which are hosting them. The RIAA can always target these sites.
Torrent trackers are static hosts with large centralized indexes, which means they are fast for clients to query but also can be easily targeted by the RIAA.
FastTrack and Gnutella get around this by offloading the tracker functionality to individual clients with high bandwith (which makes them harder to target). Each query must be forwarded from clients to their trackers, and from their trackers to other tracker nodes, and then the results must be returned the same way. This means it can take a long time for a query to complete as you wait for responses from each node.
There have been some P2P designs which eliminate tracking nodes altogether by having the clients maintain a list of close peers. The clients contact their peers which forward search requests to their list of peers and so on. Every search must be cascaded across many clients and returned from each one, so they are slow. You also must always maintain a good list of peers, or you will end up stranded from the network.
The clash of honour calls, to stand when others fall.
Ya, right. its all about the highest bidder.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Being that I live in Canada, and get more hassles going into the US then I do Japan, I wouldn't want to travel there either.
A warning to those traveling to/from Canada and South East Asia - make sure your flight doesn't stop in Hawaii. Doesn't matter if you're in transit only - they'll still send you through US customs. I had a wonderful time going through customs there for the "privilege" of seeing the airport carpark.
As for border crossing into the states...
disobeying a customs officer is a felony... (not assault, or any bodily harm. just refusing to do what they tell you to do)
"I don't think piracy will be so widespread for many more years."
Are you that blind that you forget about sneakernet?
Holy shit half of slashdot needs Alzheimer's medication.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
As MLTS has already stated, the *IAA's may be winning a few battles, but they haven't won the war. They'll have to do a lot better to prevent people like me from downloading anything and everything they want to download.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
"I don't think piracy will be so widespread for many more years."
You are a idiot. the Internet is not a linear path, its a network. You can't block an entire network when it spans the entire world. The **AA Utter Idiots also don't seem to understand the Streisand Effect, the more you block/hide something the more people will want it, and more sites will pop up. Its like chasing a racehorse by riding a slug; They will never succeed totally.
I reserve the right to have a physical object so I can sell it later, and recover my money.
Support BitBlinder. They have made torrenting more anonymous, maybe they'll figure out a way to do distributed tracking next. bitblinder.com
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
You are, of course, 1000% correct. I play on the intartubes, fool around with the darknet, bitblinder, and other high tech stuff. My kids, less so - but they have stacks and stacks of CD's and DVD's that they share with their buddies at school and elsewhere. Sneakernet is much more efficient than all my high tech bullshit. I simply don't have the bandwidth to transfer all the data that the boys can carry in the bottom of a backpack on their way to a buddy's house.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
one site down, 99,999 to go.
Are you that blind that you forget about sneakernet?
No, but you forget about DRM.
And sure, it can always be cracked - but so long as it complicates the process enough for non-geeks out there, it does its job in reducing widespread piracy. And then, when keys are in hardware (see: Motorola Milestone), what do you do?
This is old news.
Clearly, either isohunt didn't get the memo or they just don't care. I just checked and they were still indexing Robin Hood.
How does isohunt know which torrents are actual movies and which aren't? do they have to download and watch every file? I understand that the studios own the movies, but do they also own filenames?
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
Technology? Nature and logic work opposite the way that the MAFIAA evidently wishes. They don't have a prayer. For decades, they've been doing the equivalent of trying to make water flow uphill.
the only thing they can do that'll stop filesharing is to shut down the Internet
Even that wouldn't be enough. There's still sneakernet, just to name one, and not with cruddy little floppy disks anymore either. Networking can't be stopped or monopolized.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Then you have edonkey family of p2p networks which can work just fine with servers as well as decentralized p2p.
You still need decent link repository to avoid fake poisoning for pretty much every p2p network. Which is vulnurelable target: It can go down, reducing user comfort of network and opening gates to poisoning.
-- Technology for the sake of technology is as pathetic as eschewing technology because it's technology.
With ACTA and all of these recent developments, I don't think piracy will be so widespread for many more years. It's great theres good services like Spotify and Steam now though - just need similar for TV shows and movies now (and Voddler is coming).
I'm pretty confident the only thing that will curb widespread piracy is widespread availability of the same content at acceptable prices, and in acceptable formats.
Until the content providers figure that out, they will never win.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
I always thought the Streisand Effect was where attempts to censor/hide something brought more attention to it, in this case RIAA lawsuit increasing public awareness and use of bittorrent. This is more in lines with John Gilmore's quote, "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." It is impossible to stop something on the Internet.
.. make copies (download) certain movies, etc... .. to being illegal to simply store, send and receive, only *Torrents*??
Torrents are merely a collection of who(m) has a copy of a certain file(s).
This seems to be heading towards.. unless it is stopped or clarified much more.. ..Where *all* torrents are illegal.
but you didn’t listen.
Zeroth we had FTP: Not hard to shut down.
First we had one central server: Napster & co: Easy to shut down
Then we had multiple servers: eDonkey & co: Still not hard to shut down.
After that we went with a decentralized system: Gnutella & co: Pretty hard to impossible to shut down.
And finally we started to anonymize and encrypt everything too: Darknets: Nearly impossible to shut down or sue.
But then came BitTorrent, and went back to eDonkey. (Yes, the eDonkey servers also were just indexing, and not containing or transferring any files.) But with a pointlessly complicated system to share something, and not even an integrated search. Which required to go back to the stone age of web sites to find something, and felt very much like FTP. (I know that this was intentional. But that does only make it even dumber.)
And all the idiots jumped on the bandwagon because it was “fast”.
Yeah, well, every growing or big network is fast. Especially when you throw out all the protection.
Now we have the same old problems again, that we had in 2002. Way to go... good job!
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
ACTA won't end piracy. Piracy will adapt. These corporate tycoons and their congressional meat puppets are sloppy and naive. So what if IsoHunt blocks all US addresses ? This is the goddamned internet! Proxies. Use them.
Swedish courts can write injunctions until their fingers bleed, it only means people will get their fix elsewhere. TPB can't work on and other "torrent related site" ? Ok, Garry Fung can hire them up here in Canada, at least until they replace Obama with another oil baron to which our P.M. can suck up.
The biggest problem with these unconstitutional laws is they open up opportunities elsewhere. If the U.S., Sweden, or even Canada becomes unlivable for piracy sympathizers, we will find some other place to work our jobs, pay our taxes and live our lives, and there will always be at least one nation that will welcome our money with open arms. Even if that nation is China, if push comes to shove, I'll learn some Mandarin and Cantonese and go help them destroy the west.
Regardless of your stance on piracy itself, at some level you need to take a step back and look at what they're really doing here. If it's not piracy it's drugs, if it's not drugs it's sex, if it's not sex it'll be something else. Underneath it all, these are people who want our money, can't get it via normal means - in other words, they're not selling something we want to buy - so they enact arbitrary laws that force us to give up our money, whether we like it or not. Why is Oxycontin legal if you buy it from this rich guy, but it's a heinous offense if you buy it from this other guy down the street ? Why ? Because the rich guy bribes the congressmen, who bribe the regionals, who bribe the chiefs of police, who tell their lackeys which agenda to push that week. It's not about right vs wrong, it's about who paid for those Audis.
Freedom, they don't like us having it. Pick one thing, anything you hold dear. If there is a financial incentive, they will take it away from you, then sell it back at a premium.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
You're absolutely right. Who gives a crap about torrents, when you can carry a terabyte of warez in your back pocket...
Though I miss the old floppy parties, they were really just an excuse to hang out with fellow geeks and play LAN games and/or drink ourselves stupid. Fun times.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
What's an acceptable price for a steaming pile of shit ? That accounts for 95% of the *IAA's output.
I get that I'm a freak, but I would much rather torrent an album, then send a $20 paypal to the artist if I liked it, than spend $10 at Walmart to buy the same music on disc - and I'm not even tabulating my irrational hatred of Walmart yet. The big problem is that we all know the people who profit off the arts are not the ones responsible for our enjoyment. They are pimps, nobody likes a pimp. No, not even with the fuzzy purple hat and cane. Pimps are parasites, and so is the bulk of the *IAA.
Another example: in recent years I've become highly interested in the local music scene. When I find a band I like, I buy them a round and a copy of their album, or hand them a $10 and ask them to email it to me. Sometimes I help them put up a little web site, pro bono. I like that, no middleman. If it helps them make more of the music I like, great! If they want to spend the money on hookers and blow, that's cool too (call me!). If I was entertained, they deserve to be entertained, that's just how I see it.
You couldn't give me that end-to-end experience in a shrink-wrapped package, or a faceless download on iTunes. Real music fans want to connect with the artists, shoot the shit with them and thank them personally for creating something enjoyable. They don't go to shows to hear the same old music and sing along, otherwise bands wouldn't bother with the stresses of touring, they'd film the set in their backyard and sell DVDs to everyone. Fans go to shows because it's an intimate event, where they might meet & greet the idols, and meet like-minded individuals in the crowd.
Music is a social thing, you can't dumb it down to a number and a dollar sign. That's the most infinitesimally small part of it.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Next they will seek a permanent injunction against "The Internet" since you will always be able to host torrent seeds anywhere... even in comments on forums etc.